Monday, December 23, 2013

Robin Osborne on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

One
of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A
below is with Robin Osborne, Professor of
Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British
Academy.

Earlier
this year Osborne published an essay questioning one of the basic premises of
the OA movement — that research funded by the taxpayer should be freely available
to all. To claim as much, he said, was “a gross misunderstanding” of the nature
of academic research and of scholarly publication. Yet this was the premise of
the UK government-commissioned Finch Report, this was the
conclusion of the UK government when it accepted the Finch Report’s
recommendations, and this was the assumption of Research Councils UK (RCUK) when it
subsequently introduced a new OA policy.

Robin Osborne

Osborne’s
essay met with considerable hostility from OA advocates, who complained that it
was elitist, that it was insular and
arrogant, and that it was dim-witted. Doubtless Osborne
could have been more judicious in his choice of language when challenging the
OA movement. But then so could his critics when responding to him.

Be
that as it may, in conducting the Q&A below with Osborne it seemed to me
that three key questions arise from his intervention in the OA debate. First,
of course, is whether the arguments he uses are valid. Second, we might want to
ask how representative his views are. Third, we might wonder how Humanities and
Social Science (HSS) researchers (and
their societies) should respond to the growing demands that they make their
research OA, particularly since OA policies are invariably based on the habits
and practices of scientists.

As
my thoughts on these three questions turned out to be somewhat lengthy, instead
of publishing my usual foreword to this Q&A, I have attached an afterword below
it. I do this in the expectation that some readers may only want to read the
Q&A. At the very end is a further comment from Osborne in response to the afterword.

Q&A with Robin Osborne

Q:
In an essay you wrote for
the British Academy earlier this year you argued that Open Access “makes no
sense”. You explained, “There can be no such thing as free access to academic
research. Academic research is not something to which free access is possible.
Academic research is a process — a process which universities teach (at a
fee).” I think your point was that giving someone physical access to information
is not the same thing as enabling them to make use of it (As you put it, “For
those who wish to have access, there is an admission cost: they must invest in
the education prerequisite to enable them to understand the language used.”).

OA
advocates responded by accusing you of elitism. As palaeontologist Mike Taylor
(interviewed earlier in
this series) put it on his blog,
“[I]t breaks my heart to read this fusty, elitist, reactionary piece, in which
Professor Osborne ends up arguing strongly for his own irrelevance.”

Have
I understood the point you were making about access correctly, and how would
you respond to those who say that your argument was an elitist one?

A: Yes, you have understood
correctly.

The
charge of elitism seems to me extraordinary. If we did not think that there
were some sorts of communication for which there is prerequisite training we
would not have an education system. Once one has an education system one must
treat those who have been through it differently from those who have not been
through it — otherwise one is massively wasting their time. That means writing
needs to be adapted to its readership. That way what is written is less likely
to be misunderstood and is going to be more effective at making the points that
it makes.

This
is not to argue for the irrelevance of any form of scholarship, it is very
precisely to argue the opposite — that scholarship has relevance within a
particular context (that is, after all, what relevance means).

Q:
You also argued that there is “no clear dividing line between projects funded
by research councils and an academic’s daily activities of thinking and teach.
If there are fees to teaching there should be fees for access to research.” And
you further said that attributing any particular publication to a particular
funding body “is simply impossible.”

I
think you made these points in order to rebut OA advocates’ argument that
publicly-funded research should be made freely available to the public. That of
course is only one of the arguments used by OA advocates. I am struck, for instance,
that the university that has done most to advocate for OA is a private US
university — Harvard. When I asked Harvard’s Stuart Shieber why a privately
funded university has become a leader in a movement whose main rallying cry is
“public access to taxpayer-funded research” he replied, “Harvard’s
activities toward openness are based on the mission of all universities, both
public and private, to disseminate knowledge.” Would you agree that that is the
mission of all universities? If so, should not all universities and all
scholars be advocating for OA today, now that the Internet had made it possible?

A: The issue here is not whether
scholars should make some of their work available free-of-charge to the world
at large but whether scholars should be obliged to publish all work funded in a
particular way or that is to count as research that can be graded in a REF exercise
as OA.

I
have no objection to making suitable research available to all on a suitable
website. But in fact I know that I shall have greater impact — that is, be read
by more people who are in a position to make the most of my research — if I
publish within a particular framework.

So
I am currently involved a) in making my research on Athenian democracy
available in a ‘reader’ (‘LACTOR’) that will be widely used by A-level students
in the classroom; b) in producing a magazine (‘OMNIBUS’) aimed at
sixth-form students (now in its 34th year; I’ve been involved for 27 of those
years) which commissions, edits and prints short articles in which scholars
bring the insights of their research to bear on texts and topics relevant to
Greek, Latin, Class. Civ. and Ancient History A levels.

Neither
of these publications is free but publication in either LACTOR or OMNIBUS
format will get read and studied by more people than posting on an internet
site. And certainly my publishing the more technical research from which these
publications derive would have no effect at all, since the length of exposition
required for scholarly colleagues will turn off non-scholarly readers
immediately.

So
effective dissemination and OA simply are not the same thing. I’m an advocate
of the former, which is why I oppose being forced into the latter.

Q:
In reading your BA essay I formed the impression that your main objection is to
pay-to-publish Gold OA, rather than OA per se. You may know that Harvard’s Peter Suber (interviewed earlier in
this series) recently estimated that nearly
70% of journals listed in the Directory of
Open Access Journals do not charge an article-processing charge (APC) so they are
free to publish and free to read.

And
of course there is also Green OA, where authors continue to publish in
subscription journals, but then make their papers freely available by self-archiving
them in their institutional repositories. In their submission to the
Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee inquiry into Open Access earlier
this year The Classical
Association (of which you are a former President) and The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (of which I
think you are also a former President) said that they supported the principle
of Open Access to research, but argued that this can be achieved most
effectively by Green OA, so long as an embargo period of 36 months is applied. They
added that they do not feel that the subscription model for learned societies
is “in itself flawed or unsatisfactory”.

Do
the views of these organisations accord with yours? If not, in what ways do
your views differ?

A: You are right that my BA
article aimed primarily at Gold OA — partly because it was first written more
than 6 months before it appeared, when I was trying to get the BA to take OA
seriously, and at that point Gold OA was the chief game in town.

I’m
more cautious about Green OA than the CA/SPHS etc. have been, partly because
dispositionally I regard the approach that says ‘yes, but’ as politically
problematic when there are points of principle that need making, and partly
because there simply isn’t the experimental data to allow a judgement to be
passed as to whether with scholarly journals in the humanities 36 months is too
short or unnecessarily long. (The figure of 70% of journals listed in the
Directory of OA journals does not move me since in the humanities journals
serve niche markets, and so what matters is the practice of the journals
serving your niche.)

The
issue under debate is not whether a scholar should be allowed to make their
work available OA — if it were I would be fighting for that possibility. The
issue is whether scholars are going to be compelled to make their work
available OA however unsatisfactory the OA options are for them.

If
journals were being compelled towards a Green OA policy by market pressure,
that would seem to me fair enough. But instead the pressure is being applied by
research councils and by government when there is clear evidence that neither
research councils nor government have seriously thought about the consequences
or have any notion of the different publishing patterns in different subjects
and disciplines.

Q:
You prefaced your BA article by saying that the claims you were making about OA
were limited to research in the Humanities. You added, however, that “very
similar arguments apply to research in the sciences also”.

In
the recent Guardian live chat on OA that
you took part in I formed the impression that you found yourself talking at
cross purposes with those with a focus on the sciences. Do you continue to think
that similar arguments to those you used in your article also apply to the
sciences, or might it be that the situation is actually rather different for
the sciences (not least, perhaps, because there is much more funding available
for the sciences)?

A: I’ve become convinced that
there are some pretty fundamental differences between what publication means in
the sciences and what it means in the arts.

I
suspect that one sort of scientific publication is dominating the science
debate, and that there are other sorts of scientific publication that are much
closer to arts publications, but I do acknowledge that there is a big
difference between arts and STEM (though I’m not so sure about Mathematics…).

Q:
Another distinction we should perhaps make is that between journals produced by
commercial publishers and those produced by learned societies. I suspect your
focus is more on the latter (I think you are on the editorial boards of several
learned society journals for instance). The Classical Association and The
Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies certainly drew the distinction when
making their submission to the BIS Committee. And they pointed out, for
instance, that excess revenue earned from their publications helps support the
Institute of Classical Studies and their other activities (conferences,
lectures, and seminars etc.).

Learned
societies often make this argument. Critics respond by suggesting that such a
strategy is back to front. If there is a shortfall in society funds, they
argue, it is more appropriate to increase membership dues than to tax readers.

Others
argue that scholarly publishing is currently inefficient and that OA offers the
best long-term route to improving the efficiency of learned society publishing
— see this Harvard
blog post, for instance, which argues that society
publishers would be under less threat from commercial publishers if they adopted
Gold OA, since shifting from the reader-pays to the author-pays model would
make the scholarly publishing market more efficient, and so help society
publishers, many of who are currently threatened by the “big deals” offered by
large commercial publishers. Do those who make these arguments have a point, or
is their argument erroneous?

A: In many learned societies the journal comes
free with membership, so it is not a matter of increasing membership fees
rather than charging for the journal. The journal is the major ‘good’ that the
society produces.

The
problem with the Harvard blog argument — that learned society journals would be
better off under a Gold OA policy — is that it ignores the desire of such
journals to be homes to contributions from independent scholars, retired
scholars, and young scholars who are unlikely to have access to appropriate
APCs. The more care a journal takes over its submissions the better they are
for such scholars, who often have much less chance of quality feedback from
other sources before submitting their papers, but by the same token that high
quality of care means that the realistic APCs need to be very high.

Spreading
what is now paid for by 1,000 subscribers across 10 or 12 contributors has
obvious consequences for the relation of APCs to journal subscriptions:
essentially scholars would be paying up to 3 life-times of journal
subscriptions for a single contribution…

There
clearly are some small scholarly fields where readership levels are small and
the particular readership so expert that it does not need much in the way of
refereeing or copy-editing. But in fields with a significant readership in
numbers and range (e.g. classics journals being read by school teachers and by
students) high-quality refereeing, which not only sorts out the good from the
bad but much improves the good, both refereeing and copy-editing are essential.
Refereeing is done free of charge because it is in the interests of the journal
and of the learned society that runs it.

But
when a commercial publisher asks for referees’ reports it pays for them. If an
author is paying for my refereeing services I am likely to think myself
entitled to some of what he pays. If a reader is paying for the product, then I
am proud to have had a part improving the product that the learned society
produces.

Q:
How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in the UK and
internationally?

A: Lots of resignation here, and
because Green is so much less horrific than Gold people have rallied behind it,
forgetting the completely objectionable compulsion that is being applied. I’ve
less sense of the position abroad, which seems to me to be much more varied, partly
because there are many parts of the world (e.g. USA) where the scope for
compulsion is much less.

A: Green is going to be prime in
the humanities; gold may be bigger in sciences. But primarily I expect
confusion as to what counts as Green, and a lot of multiple publication of
essentially the same article, partly in OA form, partly in non-OA form.

People
who want to be read in the humanities will stick with non-OA forms for some
time to come, except when compelled to do otherwise.

Q:
If you do support the general principle of OA, what do you think still needs to
be done to achieve it, and by whom? If you do not support OA, what do you think
should be done to resist it, and who should do that?

A: I think compulsion is to be
resisted by everyone in all circumstances. I find the attempt to pretend that
there is a moral issue here itself morally repulsive.

Q:
OA advocates argue that the greatest beneficiaries of OA will be those in the developing
world, where many universities can generally afford no more than a handful of
journal subscriptions. Would you agree that the developing world faces a
serious accessibility problem, and do you think that OA can solve that problem?

A: There is no doubt about the
access problems, and many journals have distributed copies free or at much
reduced prices in certain parts of the world for a long time. But without an
appropriate educational base most scholarly literature will remain ‘Greek’.

Q:
The seeds of the OA movement (certainly for librarians) lie in the so-called “serials crisis”, which is an
affordability problem. It was this affordability problem that created the
accessibility problem that OA was intended to solve. Publishers argue that OA
will be no less expensive. OA advocates, by contrast, argue that it will be
less expensive than subscription publishing. What are your views on the
question of costs? Does cost really matter anyway?

A: Yes costs matter. But high
journal costs were a product of scholars needing a proxy for quality. Learned
society publications provided that in small fields, but the problem in science
was very different. OA has done nothing to help that problem. The problem of
having a way in each field of sorting out the important research from the
merely interesting (or indeed the mistaken) is one that remains to be sorted,
OA or not OA.

~~

Robin Osborne FBAis Professor of Ancient History in the
University of Cambridge, Fellow and Senior Tutor of King’s College Cambridge
and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was Chairman of the Council of
University Classical Departments 2006–2012, and President of the Classical
Association in 2012–13. He is the Chairman of Sub-Panel 31 in the upcoming REF
2014. His work ranges over the fields of ancient Greek History, archaeology and
Art History. His recent books include the second edition of his Greece
in the Making, 1200–479 B.C.
(London: Routledge, 2009); Athens and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010) and The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).

His list of publications is freely
available here, but you have to pay for his books.

~~

Afterword: Background and futures

When
commenting on Open Access, observers often (and rightly) point out that the OA
movement has been driven primarily by scientists. One consequence of this, they
add, is that when governments and research funders introduce OA policies they
tend to build them around the research practices of the STEM disciplines, and then take a one-size-fits-all
approach, regardless of any differences between the disciplines.

Critics argue that this is
problematic, not least because it fails to recognise that the culture and practices
of scholars working in, say, the humanities and social sciences (HSS) are very different
to those of scientists. HSS scholars tend to use different research methods,
and they generally communicate their scholarship differently. (Academics in the
humanities, for instance, are more inclined to publish monographs than submit
papers to journals — thus, in the UK’s 2008 Research
Assessment Exercise,
only 36% of the history
submissions
were of journal articles, the remainder being monographs or volumes of essays).

More
importantly, critics add, HSS scholars do not have access to the same levels of
funding as those working in the STEM disciplines. Consequently, they say, any
model requiring that researchers pay to publish is impracticable for HSS
scholars.

Nowhere
have the potential problems of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach been more
evident than in the UK, where earlier this year RCUK introduced a new OA policy
(which was first announced in July 2012).

Unlike its
previous policy (which simply called
for research papers arising from Council-funded work to be deposited in openly
available repositories i.e. Green OA), RCUK’s new policy expects researchers to
prefer Gold OA (which means publishing
in an OA journal, and generally requires authors, or their institutions or
funders, to pay an article-processing charge, or APC). At the same time, RCUK downgraded Green OA
(in which researchers continue to publish in subscription journals, but make
their papers freely available in a repository, possibly after an embargo period)
to the status of being permissible only when Gold OA is not possible. (Oddly,
RCUK maintains that the new policy is
“the first such RCUK policy”, not an amended policy).

Initially
greeted with enthusiasm by OA advocates, the new policy quickly became engulfed
in controversy. Indeed, the outcry was such that UK politicians launched two
separate inquiries (here and here), both of which published
critical reports.

As we
shall see, RCUK responded to the criticism by introducing a number of temporary
measures to mitigate the worst effects of the policy (including making a one-off payment of £10m to help
research-intensive universities pay APCs). Nevertheless, many UK researchers
remain angry at the way in which OA is being forced on them.

While
complaints have come from all directions, the most vociferous critics of the
new policy have been humanities scholars, and no group has expressed greater
concern than historians.

In
December last year, for instance, the editors of 21 history journals published
a statement in which they said “[W]e have serious
concerns about several aspects of the proposed implementation of the policy,
which we believe will have a serious effect on the reputation of UK scholarship
internationally, on peer review, and on the rights of authors.”

Looming dangers

Mandler
warned of “looming dangers to peer review, academic freedom, the activities and
charitable functions of learned societies, and the international standing (and
in some cases the continued existence) of Britain’s scholarly journals.”

He
continued: “We acknowledge that the OA plans will probably work well in the
biomedical sciences for example and certain other STEM disciplines. Indeed
something rather like the government proposals already obtains in many science
disciplines. We also acknowledge that, for many of these, some evidence exists
to validate the view of the Finch Report, endorsed by the government, that OA
stimulates innovation and thereby contributes to economic growth.”

However,
he said, “all the OA-implementing bodies currently are failing to acknowledge
key differences between the research and publication landscape in HSS and that
in most of the STEM subjects.”

One of the
primary concerns of historians, and HSS scholars more generally, is that universities
will have insufficient funds to pay for their faculty to publish all their
papers. Moreover, they fear that in apportioning what money is available, universities will
inevitably discriminate against HSS scholars. In addition, since APC funds will
be administered by university managers, decisions as to who publishes where,
and at what price, will be taken by bureaucrats, thereby restricting researchers’
freedom to publish in their journals of choice.

HSS
scholar also complain that the 12-month maximum embargo stipulated by RCUK for
HSS papers where the author has no option but to choose Green OA will threaten
the viability of society journals. And Mandler in particular has repeatedly warned
that RCUK’s insistence that all articles published as Gold OA must be made
available under a CC-BY licence will require
researchers to give away their intellectual property, and encourage plagiarism.

OA
advocates routinely dismiss these fears as unfounded (e.g. here). Nevertheless, there do
seem to be valid reasons for HSS scholars to be concerned.

Essentially,
there are two issues. First, the RCUK policy will pose problems for HSS
scholars when they seek to publish their papers. Second, this will likely have a
deleterious effect on society publishing programmes.

As the
Q&A with Osborne above shows, Mandler is not the only prominent Cambridge
historian to express concern about Open Access as a result of RCUK’s new
policy.

As the
title suggests, Osborne’s essay is not just a response to the RCUK policy. It questions
one of the primary claims of the OA movement — that publicly funded research
should be made freely available to the taxpayer.

The main
thrust of Osborne’s argument is that it is not possible to draw a straight line
between funding sources and research outputs. With any given research project,
he says, much of the work done “cannot be attributed to a funding body at all —
the thoughts were had, and much of the substantive work done, not during hours
when it might seem reasonable to reckon my time to have been bought by a
research council, or indeed by my main employer, but in my own time (and not
infrequently when I was in bed)”.

In
addition, Osborne points out that any peer-reviewed paper will be the product
not just of its author, but its reviewers too.

For these
reasons, he insists, the claim that publicly funded research should be made
freely available is based on a false premise.

Osborne also
argues that OA will inevitably lead to an increase in the amount of research
published, and a concomitant decrease in the quality of that research. As he
put it, “Purely Gold journals have no concern for satisfying subscribers or for
the number of readers. Since payments are not dependent upon the nature of the
journal, the quality of editorial input or the quality of the final product
there is no incentive to take care over any of these.”

Gross misunderstanding

However,
the most controversial claim Osborne makes in his essay is that without an
appropriate level of education no reader can hope to understand or profit from
a scholarly paper. Providing the public with access to scholarly information, therefore,
is pointless, since they will not understand it.

Thus, the final
paragraph of his essay includes the following assertion:

There is a gross misunderstanding in the open access debate
about the nature of academic research and publication. Academic research
publication is a form of teaching. Academic research publications deal not in
sets of facts or figures but in understanding. But academic research
publication is a form of teaching that assumes some prior knowledge. For those
who wish to have access, there is an admission cost: they must invest in the
education prerequisite to enable them to understand the language used.

As
it happens, the argument that lay people are unable to understand scholarly papers
is not new: it has been stated many times before in response to calls for
science papers to be made OA.

But
is it a valid argument? Certainly the growing trend for citizen science and knowledge crowdsourcing would appear to
challenge any such claim. In fact, the signs are that the lay public is not
only able to understand peer-reviewed papers but, when given access to them, can
play an active role in the scientific process.

In
refuting the claim that ordinary citizens are unable to understand scholarly articles
OA advocates invariably cite the example of 15-year-old US schoolboy Jack Andraka, who used Google to locate freely-available
science papers on the Internet, and then applied the knowledge he had acquired
from them to invent a new, rapid, and inexpensive method for detecting an
increase of a protein that indicates the presence of pancreatic, ovarian, and
lung cancer during its early stages (when there is a better survival rate with
current treatments). This necessitated Andraka getting to grips with, amongst
other things, nanotubes and cancer
biochemistry.

We
could also note that since it started making its faculty papers freely
available in its institutional repository, MIT has been showered with messages from grateful
beneficiaries of the initiative. Amongst those to thank MIT was a fifth grader who
acquired a new insight into planet composition after downloading an MIT paper,
and a high school debater who used MIT’s repository to research the topic of
nuclear proliferation when preparing for a debating competition.

If
schoolchildren are able to benefit from having access to peer-reviewed scientific
papers (and can occasionally devise new medical procedures as a result) it
seems reasonable to assume that many ordinary citizens would be able to understand
and benefit from scholarly papers published in Osborne’s fields of expertise —
Greek history, Athenian law, ancient social and economic history, and Classical
art and archaeology — without first having to take a degree in ancient history.

We
might therefore want to conclude that Osborne’s claim that the public cannot
understand scholarly writing is plain wrong.

Elitist?

It is therefore
no surprise that his essay drew immediate fire from angry OA advocates. In a
blog post entitled “Why Robin Osborne Makes no sense,” for instance,
palaeontologist Mike Taylor wrote:

At a time when the world as a whole is waking up to the
open-access imperative, it breaks my heart to read this fusty, elitist,
reactionary piece, in which Professor Osborne ends up arguing strongly for his
own irrelevance. What a tragic lack of vision, and of ambition.

Even the
world’s most generous-minded and amiable OA advocate Stephen Curry (the one natural
scientist invited to contribute to the British Academy essay collection in which
Osborne’s essay appeared) confessed to scratching his head in perplexity while
reading Osborne’s essay. “I struggled to see the world from historian Robin
Osborne’s point of view”, he wrote on his blog.

We are,
however, bound to wonder: are Osborne’s views peculiar to him, or are they
representative of the Classics community?

Anyone reading
Osborne’s essay might be inclined to conclude that they are representative. After all, if one of the world’s leading
Classics scholars believes that the public is incapable of understanding peer-reviewed
papers then it would seem likely that his colleagues agree with him, particularly
since Classics has a long-standing reputation for being an elitist subject
studied by snooty people.

But that might
be the wrong conclusion to reach. Classics was one of the first disciplines to start
making its writings freely available on the Internet. In 1990, for instance, a
group of Classicists founded the open access journal Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR), the world’s second
oldest online humanities journal (BMCR
went live a few weeks after Postmodern Culture). Moreover, BMCR was launched a year before physicists (the discipline usually
credited with having pioneered OA) created the now famous
preprint server arXiv.

If
Classicists believe their work is too learned for anyone but their peers, we
might ask, why did the BMCR founders not
put the journal in a walled garden? Even if they had not wanted to charge for access
they could have restricted entry to those they believed capable of
understanding the contents. And why does BMCR
have an associated blog where anyone in the
world can comment on the contents of the journal?

We could
also note that in 1995 US Classicist Jim O'Donnell (one of BMCR’s founders) co-edited a book consisting
almost exclusively of extracts from an email debate sparked when one of the
seminal texts of the Open Access movement was posted online — viz. Stevan Harnad’s“Subversive Proposal”).

Should we
therefore conclude that Osborne’s views are idiosyncratic? What do most Classicists think about OA? I
put this question to Peter Heslin, a senior lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at
Durham University.
Heslin has a long-standing interest in the digital humanities, especially
open-source software and open-access databases for the study of classical texts.

He
replied, “I suspect that most Classicists are reasonably happy with the current
structures for publication in the field, and in the absence of extortionate
subscription fees for Classics journals, they probably take the attitude that
‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. This is an eminently sensible position with
which I am basically in sympathy. This is why I am a strong advocate of Green
OA.”

He added,
“I am opposed to so-called ‘Gold OA’ — in the humanities it would be a
disaster, indistinguishable from vanity publication. I am very strongly
opposed, just as much as Robin, to any external mandate of a particular form of
publication, particularly Gold OA.”

In other
words, Heslin is not opposed to OA, only to mandated pay-to-publish Gold OA. Indeed,
as he notes, he actively supports Green OA, and he implies that other
Classicists do too. For that reason, he says, he was disappointed that Osborne
failed to mention Green OA in his essay.

“The main
problem with Robin's polemic is that he collapses the distinction between mandated
OA and mandated Gold OA,” he says. “Indeed, he makes no reference to the
existence of Green OA. The naive Classicist who reads Robin's piece would
have no idea that there is any kind of OA apart from the perverse model of
mandated Gold OA which is being pushed by publishers upon the UK government.”

Heslin adds,
“In taking a position which is as extremist in its own way as the government’s,
Robin's piece has done a grave disservice to the quality of discourse around
this issue. If he had titled his piece "Why Gold Open Access Makes No
Sense", I would have agreed with most of it.”

Like others,
Heslin singles out the final paragraph of Osborne’s essay as the most unfortunate.
“The popular reaction to Robin's piece has focused especially on its
inflammatory final paragraph, in which he seems to imply that, although a plebeian
without a Cambridge education may someday be able to download his work, the
insolent boor cannot expect to understand it.”

But while,
like Osborne, Heslin believes Gold OA to be inherently problematic (“indistinguishable
from vanity publication”) not all Classicists share this view.

Commenting
on Osborne’s essay O’Donnell says, “Robin Osborne is a distinguished scholar
and leader, whose judgments merit attention. His essay on OA does an excellent
job of making the point that scholarly research is not ‘work for hire’ and that
the assumption that a funder should have controlling interest in the
disposition of work arising from the research still needs to be worked through
very carefully.”

He adds
however, “It’s unfortunate that Osborne ties his analysis to a gratuitous claim
that ‘Gold OA’ publishing is inherently weak on peer review. Quality of peer
review is an issue needing attention in every domain of scholarly/scientific
publishing and there are certainly both well and badly refereed OA journals.
Whether OA journals emerge as consistently weak on peer review is an empirical
question, not a theoretical one.

As we
shall see, however, the controversy surrounding the new RCUK policy has not
primarily been focussed on the quality of Gold OA, but on the consequences of governments
and funders seeking to compel researchers to embrace pay-to-publish Gold OA, particularly
resource-starved HSS scholars who will inevitably struggle to find the
necessary funds.

Not a real solution

Before
coming on to that, we might first ask whether we can be sure that the views of
Heslin and O’Donnell are any more representative of the Classics community than
Osborne’s.

While
stressing that they would, in principle, like to see wider access, the four societies
argued that the current subscription system is adequate for Classics.

“We do
wish to make the results of research and of general intellectual creativity in
our field as widely available as possible — that is one of the principal aims
for which we were founded,” they wrote. “However, we do not believe that in our
subject area Gold Open Access is the best way of achieving this, or that, when
the whole pattern of our activities is considered, above all in an
international context, the subscription model for learned journals is in itself
flawed or unsatisfactory.”

It is
important to note that these societies are also publishers. As such, their
views on OA will inevitably be influenced by the fact that they produce their
own journals. But why do they believe Gold OA is not the best way of improving
access to the work of Classical scholarship?
Because, they explained in their submission, the Finch Report proposes
transferring payment from readers and their institutions to authors and their
institutions. This, they maintained, “is not a real solution.”

We might
wonder why it would make any difference to a society how the costs of
publishing its journals were underwritten, and by who — so long as somebody did
so. To answer this we can reiterate our earlier two points. First, it is feared
that authors in HSS disciplines will not have access to the fees needed to pay
to publish all their papers (thereby restricting their ability to communicate
their research). Second, as a consequence of this, their societies will
struggle to continue funding their journals.

Essentially,
this is based on the assumption that where scholarly journals have historically
been funded through university libraries paying subscriptions, once responsibility
for funding shifts directly to the author, then libraries will be reluctant (or
unable) to pay article-processing charges for authors, not least because — for
the foreseeable future at least — they will have to continue paying subscriptions.

OA
advocates respond to this concern by arguing that publication costs are really a
component part of the research process, and so in an OA environment responsibility
will naturally shift from institutions to funders. In fact, they point out, this
principle has been accepted by RCUK, which is providing block grants to universities to cover
the publishing costs arising from its OA policy.

But is it
that simple? It seems not. Universities maintain that the grants provided by
RCUK are far from adequate. In November, for instance, the Russell Group of universities warned that the money set
aside by the Research Councils for this purpose “will only cover ‘gold’ open
access costs for around 10% of the publications from Russell Group
universities”.

There are
also fears that shifting costs from the reader to the author will have further
funding implications for societies. When I raised this issue with Osborne, for
instance, he said that the pay-to-publish Gold OA model is not workable for
Classics journals for the following reason: “Spreading what is now paid for by
1,000 subscribers across 10 or 12 contributors has obvious consequences for the
relation of APCs to journal subscriptions: essentially scholars would be paying
up to 3 life-times of journal subscriptions for a single contribution...”

All in
all, there do seem to be valid reasons for HSS disciplines to fear mandated
pay-to-publish Gold OA. As such, it is not helpful, or fair, to wave aside their
concerns, and certainly not in the discourteous manner OA advocates are
inclined to do.

Back to front?

So let’s
examine this issue a little further. OA advocates argue that societies are in a
dilemma over OA because they treat their publishing programmes as cash cows. In
other words, they deliberately generate excess revenue from their journals in
order to fund their other activities.

With this thought
in mind I put it to Osborne that it was a back-to-front approach. Rather than continuing
to subsidise their various activities through their publishing programmes, should
societies not increase their membership dues to a level that would allow them
to fund those activities without having to subsidise them from their journal
subscriptions? If they did so they would be in a better position to migrate to an
OA-publishing environment perhaps?

Osborne
replied “In many learned societies the journal comes free with membership, so
it is not a matter of increasing membership fees rather than charging for the
journal. The journal is the major ‘good’ that the society produces.”

But this
tells only half the story. Even where members of a society receive free copies
of its journals, subscriptions to the journals are nevertheless sold to
non-members.

So, for
instance, while all 1,600 members of the SPSH receive free copies of its two journals,
there are also 3,100 institutional subscribers, who pay the Society (via Cambridge
University Press, to which the Society has outsourced its publishing programme)
an annual charge for electronic access to the journals.

We can get
a sense of the extent to which a society may depend on its subscription revenues
by reviewing the most recent report and financial statement published by the SPHS.
This says: “It should be noted
that without the £27,282 of income from the sales of the digitised journals the
Society would have run at a non-negligible deficit.”

And it
adds, “Whether the Society succeeds in achieving a surplus in 2013 is likely to
depend on the size of the income from this source.”

The point
is clear: like most societies, the SPHS is heavily dependent on the revenue it
earns from its journals, and it uses this income to fund its other activities —
a point confirmed by the Classics
societies in their submission to BIS.

So it is
no surprise that learned societies fear that if they exchange their
subscription revenues for APCs (which are likely to have to reflect the real
costs of publishing) an undesirable hole will open up in their income, one that
might even threaten their very existence. And because they believe many HSS scholars
will struggle to obtain the necessary funds to pay to publish, HSS societies conclude
that they are doubly vulnerable.

As the four
Classics societies put it to the BIS Committee, a system based on pay-to-publish
Gold OA “would create financial uncertainty and risk which would imperil the
sustainability of our journals.”

They also
pointed out that a pay-t0-publish requirement like that introduced by RCUK
needs to be seen in an international context, since “the distribution of the Journal
of Hellenic Studies and Journal of Roman Studies is about 10% to the
UK, and 90% to the rest of the world”.

Despite
his OA credentials, US Classicist Jim O’Donnell agrees there is a danger here.
“To an American classicist, it’s painfully obvious that the slightly
complicated funding arrangements of the CA, SPHS, and SPRS need to be respected
if a very important baby isn’t to be pitched out with a small splash of
bathwater,” he told me. “Even the most zealous proponent of OA would not claim
that moving journals to OA is a uniquely supreme priority. If British policy
broke the viability of those associations and their journals, it would be a
great loss around the world to many, including myself.”

And since much
of their research is published as monographs rather than journal articles, HSS
scholars’ concern about is all the greater. While RCUK does not currently
require OA for books (for the moment merely “encouraging” authors to consider it)
it is assumed that at some point books will be subject to the same OA
requirement.

The
problem is that the cost of publishing an OA book is really rather daunting. Currently
prices range from £11,000 to £12,000. In fact, says publishing
consultant Joe Esposito (interviewed earlier in this
series), this is probably an underestimate of the true costs. These, he suggests, are more likely to be in
the region of $50,000, or £37,000 per book. (OAPEN-NL puts the figure at €12,000, or £10,100).

For a
sense of how HSS researchers react when told how much it costs to publish an OA
book we can refer to a blog post by Monica Berti. A Classicist at the University of
Leipzig, Berti was recently asked to pay £10,000 to publish a book.

In her response to the publisher Berti concluded,
“I am uncomfortable in putting my name to a Digital Humanities series that touts
a £10,000 pay to publish open access policy as fair or egalitarian. I’m not going to edit your £10,000
pay-to-open-access-publish monograph series. I doubt that any leading figure in
our field would, but I wish you well in finding the person to take this book
series forward.”

Green OA

Should we
conclude from all this that Osborne is right to spurn OA? No, says Heslin.
Rather than forcing researchers to pay to publish, he says, RCUK should tell
them to continue publishing in subscription journals but self-archive their
papers in their institutional repository (i.e. Green OA). Doing so would cost researchers
nothing, and it would enable societies to continue selling subscriptions.

It was
Osborne’s failure to discuss this possibility in his essay that so dismayed
Heslin. Instead of directly addressing the threat the RCUK policy poses for
Classicists, he says, Osborne chose to focus on making the trivial point that it
is hard to draw a direct line between a particular funding source and a
particular research output.

“If Robin
had stressed the fact that the government is trying to set up its own
publication framework ex nihilo and to destroy a well-functioning system, many
readers outside the field would have grasped the danger immediately”, he says.
“Robin ought to have said that the government has every right to insist upon a
general principle of OA, but that it has no business or expertise by which it
should insist on the precise form of publication in every field. This point, if
accepted by the government, would allow the field of Classics to continue doing
things pretty much just as it has always done under the rubric of Green OA.”

Instead,
says Heslin, “Osborne made the choice of formulating an extreme position, and
did so in a way that many have taken to confirm the worst aspects of the
popular view of Classics as a field:
elitist, patronizing, arrogant, out-of-touch, entitled.”

We are
further inclined therefore to view Osborne’s position on OA is an idiosyncratic
and unrepresentative one. Certainly he seems to be out of sync with other
Classicists. In their BIS submission, for instance, the four Classics societies
proposed the same solution as Heslin. “[W]e believe Open Access in HSS subjects
will be achieved most effectively, with least extra cost and disruption, by a
Green model of publication, such as we already use.”

They
added: “We, like most learned societies, already operate forms of Green Open
Access, after an embargo period of 36 months … In our view this system … already
provides a satisfactorily high level of Open Access while enabling us to
sustain publication of our journals to world-class standards of intellectual
content and presentation.”

It is
worth underling the point that the Classics societies assume (as does Heslin) that
subscription publishing is entirely compatible with Green OA. However, like
most publishers, the societies insist that in order to protect their income it
is vital that papers only become freely available after an embargo. And their
view is that 36 months is an appropriate timescale.

OA
advocates, by contrast, argue that 36 months is far too long. Indeed, most now believe
that there is no need for embargoes at
all. (We
should perhaps note, however, that the Classics societies’ embargo seems to
apply to the publisher’s pdf only, with researchers free to self-archive their postprints
immediately. Some OA advocates would argue that this is sufficient).

Osborne’s
failure to mention Green OA is all the more striking given that at the time the
BIS submission was made he was President of the
Classical Association
(he is also a former President of the SPHS).

When I
asked him why he had made no mention of Green OA in his essay, he replied that
it was, “partly because it was first written more than 6 months before it
appeared, when I was trying to get the BA to take OA seriously, and at that
point Gold OA was the chief game in town.”

In
addition, he said, he is “more cautious” about Green OA than the societies — because
there, “simply isn’t the experimental data to allow a judgement to be passed as
to whether with scholarly journals in the humanities 36 months is too short or
unnecessarily long.”

He also added
that while he accepts that “Green is going to be prime in the humanities” he is
concerned this will lead to “confusion as to what counts as Green, and a lot of
multiple publication of essentially the same article, partly in OA form, partly
in non-OA form.”

Compulsion

Unlike
most Classicists, therefore, Osborne appears to believe that neither Gold nor
Green OA is desirable. Gold OA is impracticable for researchers, and threatens
the survival of their society journals; and Green OA introduces uncertainty and
confusion, and too might threaten the viability of society journals if the
embargo is too short. Finally, since Osborne believes that ordinary citizens
are unable to understand scholarly papers he sees OA providing no advantage to
the taxpayer. In short, “open access makes no sense”.

In the Q&A
above, however, I formed the impression that Osborne’s real objection is to the
compulsory nature of OA policies. He sees a world of difference between
scholars making their work freely available voluntarily and being told by their
institutions and/or funders that they must do so.

Those who
support the RCUK policy, he says, forget “the completely objectionable
compulsion that is being applied … I think compulsion is to be resisted by
everyone in all circumstances.”

About this
Heslin also disagrees with Osborne. While the UK government is wrong to insist
that scholars publish in a particular way, he says, Classicists should not
assume that they can or should withstand demands to make their work freely
available. “The days when Classics could presume government funding without any
strings attached whatsoever is long gone, nor is it a reasonable or justifiable
expectation,” he says.

But Osborne
apparently does believe researchers should resist attempts to force OA on them.
Moreover, he says, “there are many parts of the world (e.g. USA) where the
scope for compulsion is much less.”

So let’s
explore that. First, is there any evidence that researchers detest being
compelled to embrace OA, and are therefore determined to resist it? We could
note that a 2005 survey revealed that 95% of
sampled researchers said that they would self-archive if required to
do so by their employers and/or funders: 81% of them willingly, 14%
reluctantly, and only 5% said they would not comply with the requirement. [For humanities specifically, the latter figures
were 90%, 8% and 2% — Table 30].

However, that
survey is now eight years old, and it is possible that attitudes have changed
since then.

Be that as
it may, in recent years both funders and universities have been busy
introducing mandates. In fact, the first departmental self-archiving mandate
was introduced in 2001 by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at Southampton University. And the first two
university-wide OA mandates in the UK were introduced in 2008, by the
universities of Southampton and Stirling.

In total 62 UK universities and
research funders now have OA policies in place, including Heslin’s home
institution the University of Durham. Most of these mandates
are assumed to be compulsory, and yet I am aware of no resistance movement having
emerged (although there has been foot dragging over compliance).

Looking further afield, there are now 332 OA
policies around the world, including 195 institutional mandates, nine
multi-institutional mandates, 43 sub-institutional mandates, and 85 funder
mandates.

Notable
amongst the university mandates is one introduced at the University of Liège. This stipulates that only
works that have been deposited in the university repository will be eligible to
be counted for promotion and tenure purposes. In effect, therefore, the Liège
model is as compulsory as a policy can hope to be, since no researcher would
want to jeopardise their career by flouting it. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Liège
model has proved very successful and has subsequently been
adopted by the Belgium research funder FRNS.

In
addition, the European Union has recently published details of its new OA policy.
This is a Green OA mandate that allows for an
embargo of six months for STEM, 12 months for HSS. And most recently, Argentina
has introduced a national mandate. Flouting this mandate
means ineligibility for further public financial support. And strikingly, it requires
that all publicly-funded papers (both STEM and HSS), must be deposited in an
institutional repository no later than six months after acceptance or
publication.

To date,
however, the most significant and successful OA mandate is surely the Public Access Policy introduced in 2005 by the US National Institutes of Health
(NIH). The
NIH is the largest source of funding for medical research in the world and its
policy is entirely compulsory (if one assumes that no researcher would want to
risk being barred from further NIH funding in the future by not complying).

So it
would seem the scope for compulsion in the US is pretty wide. As we noted, the
only real resistance to OA mandates is foot-dragging over compliance. But following
a crackdown, compliance to the NIH
mandate has recently increased, with 75% of the papers arising from research
funded by NIH now being deposited in the PubMed Central repository. And this percentage continues
to rise.

True, the
NIH policy is targeted at scientists rather than HSS scholars. Nevertheless, there
are today 131 mandates in the US. Amongst
the latter are policies introduced at major universities like Harvard, MIT, Princeton and the University of California. And these policies apply
both to scientists and HSS scholars.

Given this
background we might wonder why the RCUK policy has attracted such criticism.
The answer is clear: it is the only OA mandate in the world to require
researchers to choose Gold OA over Green OA. All other policies either prioritise
Green OA, or allow researchers to choose which form of OA to use.

Bearing in
mind Osborne’s views on whether publicly-funded research ought to be free to
taxpayers, we could point out that while calls for OA in the US have generally majored
on the slogan “American Taxpayers are
entitled to the research they’ve paid for”, the movement to introduce OA policies
in US universities has been led by Harvard, the wealthiest private university
in the world.

When I interviewed the architect of the Harvard
OA policy — Stuart Shieber — I asked him why a
privately funded university had become a leader in a movement whose main
rallying cry is “public access to taxpayer-funded research”. Shieber replied.
“Harvard’s activities toward openness are based on the mission of all
universities, both public and private, to disseminate knowledge”.

Or as the Provost
of Harvard UniversitySteven
Hyman puts it, “The goal of
university research is the creation, dissemination, and preservation of
knowledge. At Harvard, where so much of
our research is of global significance, we have an essential responsibility to
distribute the fruits of our scholarship as widely as possible.”

When I put
this point to Osborne in the Q&A above, he replied, “The issue here is not
whether scholars should make some of their work available free-of-charge to the
world at large but whether scholars should be obliged to publish all work
funded in a particular way or that is to count as research that can be graded in
a REF exercise in OA.”

Once
again, we see that Osborne is focused on Gold, not Green OA. But this takes us
to a second point. Is it true, as Osborne seems to imply, that OA policies are
inevitably compulsory? In fact, no. One point I did not make in my question to
Osborne is that US institutional mandates are not generally compulsory. Rather
than being top-down diktats, US Open Access policies are usually introduced by
faculty vote — using the model Shieber pioneered
in 2008 when he persuaded Harvard’s
Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) to agree to introduce
an OA policy.

To date, 46 Harvard-style
policies
have been introduced, mainly in the US, but also in countries as diverse as
Iceland and Kenya. And in the US, many of the universities to adopt this model
are, like Harvard, private not public universities.

In other
words, scholars in North America are embracing OA not because they are
compelled to do so, but because they think it is the right thing to do. They vote
to introduce OA policies because they believe that disseminating knowledge is a
core part of a university’s mission.

Consider,
for example, the mission statement of the Ivy League
university Cornell, which includes a
commitment “to discover, preserve, and disseminate knowledge; produce creative
work; and promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell
community.”

As it
happens, Cornell has yet to introduce an OA policy, but pressure is growing to
do so, and in making a case for it, advocates cite the university’s mission.

Why are US
universities introducing OA policies now and not earlier? Because OA was not
possible before the Internet developed. Now that it is, many scholars are
concluding that they have a duty to use the distributive potential of the
online medium to reaffirm and reinforce their institution’s mission to
disseminate knowledge.

Voluntarism

What is
significant about the Harvard-style OA policy, therefore, is that it is built not
on compulsion but voluntarism: researchers vote to commit themselves and their
faculty to making their research OA. Indeed, not only is there no compulsion,
but even when a policy is in place any member of faculty can request a waiver
for any paper, at any time, simply by filling out an online form.

We should
point out that some OA advocates are critical of
non-compulsory approaches to OA, and so like to distinguish between “OA mandates” and
“OA policies” (and imply that the former are superior). But voluntarism can be
a useful (often essential) way of getting members of faculty to buy in to OA.
And citing a university’s mission may be key to success when trying to get a
mandate (or policy) passed.

As it
happens, a commitment to disseminate knowledge is not specific to North American
universities. Consider, for instance, the mission statement of Osborne’s home institution Cambridge
University. This contains a section outlining the University’s relationship and
responsibilities to wider society, and includes a commitment to “the pursuit,
dissemination, and application of knowledge.”

Some might
quibble over whether such a commitment does imply OA. But at a time when even
Harvard University can no longer afford to
buy access to all the journals it needs, it is clear that the traditional method
of disseminating scholarly research (the subscription journal) is no longer fit
for purpose. Each time the price of a journal increases, the ability of the
traditional system to distribute scholarly content effectively decreases. And the
constant increase in prices not only limits
the university’s ability to purchase all the serials it needs, but it inevitably
reduces the number of monographs that can be acquired, since an increasing
proportion of the library budget is eaten up paying for journals.

If the
traditional system can no longer effectively disseminate knowledge, but OA can remedy
the problem it might seem irresponsible for any university not to introduce an
OA mandate. Certainly it is for this reason that many joined the OA movement in
the first place, and it is the reason why many US scholars are now voting for OA
policies.

So however
we might sympathise with Osborne’s distaste for compulsion, we should perhaps
conclude that his views on OA appear to run counter not only to those of his
peers, but also to his institution’s mission, and to the two Classics societies
of which he is a former president. As the Classics societies pointed out to the BIS inquiry, making
the results of research as widely available as possible “was one of the
principal aims for which we were founded”.

But while
Osborne is clearly opposed to compulsion, perhaps he nevertheless supports the principle
of OA? If so, then the Harvard model would surely address his concerns, since
there is no compulsion involved.

When I asked
Osborne if he thinks that — now that the Internet has made it possible —
universities and scholars should all be advocating for OA he replied, “I have
no objection to making suitable research available to all on a suitable
website. But in fact I know that I shall have greater impact — that is, be read
by more people who are in a position to make the most of my research — if I
publish within a particular framework.”

He also
makes the (not unreasonable) point that it is easier for people to understand what
they are reading if it has been written with their current level of knowledge
in mind. “I publish my research in a great number of different ways, ways that
are adapted to the needs of different readerships,” he says. “By my choice of
highly specialist journal, generalist journal, university press or a popular
publisher, in a magazine for sixth-formers or a political weekly, I signal to
whom I think I have made my research accessible.”

But he
then adds: “Those who, on the basis of those signals, expect that they will
understand and are interested enough in what I think and what I have said, pay
for access to my thoughts.”

In other
words, Osborne believes that, whatever the intended audience, the work of
scholars should always come with a price tag attached. Or as he put it his
essay, “If there are fees for access to teaching there should be fees for
access to research.” (But see Osborne’s response to my commentary below).

We could
also comment that Osborne’s point about the need to write to a particular
audience assumes it is possible to anticipate the level of understanding that any
reader brings to a text, and that all the readers of any piece of writing come
with the same level of understanding.

We have
suggested that Osborne’s views are not representative of Classicists. Heslin agrees.
And he worries that Osborne’s essay has unfairly tarnished the image of
Classics — at a time when many Classicists are seeking to
demonstrate
the subject’s relevance to the wider community.

“Robin’s
less judicious remarks have endorsed the public view of Classics as something
out of a Tom Sharpe caricature: that we are outmoded and self-satisfied
navel-gazers, swilling port at high table and indignant at public inspection of
our privileges,” says Heslin. “At this moment in time, that is not the sort of
ammunition we need to give our enemies.”

But while Osborne’s
views may not be representative of Classicists, or indeed of UK researchers at
large, we might wonder whether they reflect the dominant view in Oxbridge. Certainly
the efforts to discredit OA by Cambridge historians like Mandler and Osborne would
support such a conclusion, as would the fact that neither Cambridge nor Oxford have
an OA policy in place.

What is
the situation in Oxbridge today? A Cambridge University spokesperson told me
that while the University supports the principle of OA, scholars are not required
to do anything about it. At Oxford, meanwhile, a spokesperson told me that while
researchers are recommended and requested to deposit a copy of their papers in
the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) — “for preservation or
visibility at a future time” — there is no OA policy as such.

For all that, Osborne vehemently denies that his views are
elitist. “The charge of elitism seems to me extraordinary,” he says. “If we did
not think that there were some sorts of communication for which there is
prerequisite training we would not have an education system. Once one has an
education system one must treat those who have been through it differently from
those who have not been through it”.

Nor does
he believe that OA raises any moral issues, as OA advocates often claim. “I find the attempt to
pretend that there is a moral issue here itself morally repulsive.”

Phoney war

So what do
we conclude? However idiosyncratic Osborne’s views on OA might or might not be,
his intervention in the debate has served to underline what astute OA advocates
have long been saying. First, that imposing a one-size-fits-all OA policy on
the research community is not easy, and probably not wise (particularly for HSS
scholars and their societies). Second, while mandating Green OA can be highly
effective, forcing researchers down a pay-to-publish Gold OA road is fraught
with difficulties, and surely not wise. (As we saw, the RCUK policy is the only one that requires researchers
to prioritise Gold over Green OA).

The
controversy over the RCUK policy has also confirmed that what O’Donnell calls
the “slightly complicated funding arrangements” of learned societies would
cause them serious funding problems if they were forced to migrate to Gold OA
in the way the RCUK policy envisages.

There has
been another important change too. In
July, after one of its directors had been grilled by British
politicians about the RCUK policy — the Higher Education Funding Council for
England (HEFCE) published its draft criteria for the post-2014
Research Excellence Framework (REF). In practice, this
will be an OA mandate, but one without a preference for a particular type of OA.
It will require that research outputs are made accessible “through a UK HEI
repository, immediately upon either acceptance or publication, though the
repository may provide access in a way that respects agreed embargo periods”.
And this can be achieved by either Green or Gold OA.

Even more
significantly, HEFCE said that it plans to count for REF purposes only those research
outputs that have been deposited in the author’s institutional repository. As
such, its rules would operate like the mandate introduced at the University of
Liège.

And
although HEFCE will expect researchers to abide by publisher embargos, OA
advocates have been quick to point out that most repository software today
includes a “copy-request” button. This means that anyone
wanting to read a paper still subject to an embargo need simply press a button in
the repository and request a copy. The button automatically sends a message to the
paper’s author(s) requesting that they email a personal copy to the requester.

All in
all, therefore, following a period of intense and often bitter disagreement an
uneasy peace appears to have descended on the OA battlefield.

But it
would be dangerous for those who have criticised the policy to assume that RCUK
has surrendered. Rather we appear to be in the midst of what one might call a
phoney war, with the underlying issues still unresolved.

This is
not always apparent, however, because those speaking for the policy are
inclined to employ a form of doublespeak when discussing it — continuing, for
instance, to insist that the UK has (in the words of the Finch Review Report) become a “test-bed for
the implementation of a policy preference for Gold OA”, where in reality RCUK
has put key parts of its policy on hold.

Elsewhere,
when speaking to the Open Access Futures in
the Humanities and Social Sciences conference in October, Finch group memberAdam Tickell seemed keen to make a
distinction between theoretical preferences and practical preferences, insisting, for instance, that the amended RCUK
policy contains no “practical preference” for pay-to-publish OA — a point noted by The Times Higher Education.

In other
words, despite its temporary retreat, RCUK anticipates that in five years’ time
most (if not all) the outputs from any research that it has funded will be
published as Gold OA as originally planned. And it assumes the authors will pay
for the privilege (at an average cost, the Finch Report estimated, of £1,727
per paper) using RCUK funds. At that point too, of course, all HSS journals will
be expected to offer Gold OA.

Moreover,
in reading RCUK’s response to the BIS report it
would appear that the concession on embargoes is not quite what critics of the
policy assume. RCUK states, for instance, that its policy on embargoes “is
unchanged since July 2012 [when first announced], and requires publishers to
provide a 6 month embargo period for STEM and 12 month period for HASS
subjects”.

It adds
that the (temporary) extension to embargoes is only permissible “where no funds
are available to cover the payment of APCs”. This would seem to suggest that
the extended embargoes are only allowable if researchers do not have the funds
to pay for Gold OA.

Speaking
at the Berlin 11 meeting in November, UK Science
Minister David Willettsdescribed the situation a slightly more nuanced
way: “Where the publisher is not offering Gold open access, we will not support
articles with an embargo of longer than 6 months for STEM subjects and 12
months for the humanities. However, if the publisher is offering Gold, but the
researcher is unable or unwilling to pay the Article Publication Charge, the
embargo will extend to 12 months for STEM and 24 months for the humanities.”

For
Classicists the important point is that, however one interprets the above
statements, the maximum embargoes possible are 12 months for STEM and 24 months
for HSS. If the UK Classics societies really believe that they need to impose a
36-month embargo in order to ensure the long-term survival of their journals
then the situation has clearly not been resolved for them, even with the
interim measures in play.

RCUK’s
critics, in short, should not interpret the funder’s concessions as a
surrender, more a re-grouping, or an attempt to play for time perhaps.

That said, Harnad believes that HEFCE's
immediate-deposit requirement meliorates the RCUK policy by mooting publisher
embargoes on Green: “It provides institutions with an incentive and
mechanism for monitoring and ensuring compliance with RCUK's Green option,
thereby making it unnecessary to comply by picking and paying for Gold.”

Moreover,
he says, five years is a long time in what he anticipates will be a fast-moving
global environment for OA. “During those five years the rest of the world will
be taking more reflective and effective steps, and they will all be greenward,”
he says, “and the HEFCE policy will ensure that the UK keeps up with the rest
of the world, despite itself.”

Consequently,
he adds, RCUK’s hopes of achieving 100% Gold OA in 5 years is fantasy. “Many of
us are now pressing very hard for the adoption of the optimal Green OA mandate
(Liège /HEFCE) in order not to lose still more years of access and impact,
needlessly.”

In short, Harnad
anticipates that by the time RCUK’s “transition period” comes to an end the
rest of the world will have taken a different (Green) road, and the UK will be
forced to abandon its gold-preferred approach as a result.

But it
might be dangerous for HSS scholars and their societies to rely on Harnad’s prediction
coming true. For one thing, the next G8 science ministers meeting (to be held in
March) will be hosted by the UK. This will allow Willetts to set the agenda;
and in doing so, he can be expected to do his utmost to persuade other G8
members to sign up to the UK model.

Speaking
to delegates at the Berlin 11 meeting, Willetts suggested that the omens here are
good. “I was delighted to hear at the weekend that the Dutch have joined the
British, the Germans and the Austrians in boldly committing to funding Gold
open access. This is good news and will, I hope, encourage other countries to
follow suit and commit to Gold.”

It is not entirely
clear what Willetts meant when he talked of the Germans and Austrians committing
to Gold (not gold-preferred presumably), but there are certainly signs that the Netherlands
may be willing to follow the UK’s example.

The point
is that if the UK does succeed in propagating its model of OA then RCUK’s “post
transition end state” is likely to become a reality at the end of the
transition period. This would presumably also moot the HEFCE agnosticism on how
OA is achieved, since the only way RCUK-funded researchers would be able to comply
with the REF requirements would be by opting for Gold OA for their papers (as
RCUK will at that point require).

What is
certain is that the pressure on HSS scholars and their societies to embrace OA will
intensify in the next few years. This in turn will deepen their concern about the
issues raised earlier this year by Mandler, including the threat HSS scholars see
to their academic freedom, the likelihood that bureaucratic control (what
Newcastle University’s Kyle Grayson refers to as “managerialism”) will
further erode their independence, and the possibility that authors’ rights will
be diminished too.

But at
least HSS scholars may have the necessary funds to pay to publish all their
articles.

What to do?

It may
also be that some of their other concerns will, as OA advocates predict, turn
out to be misplaced. However, we should not doubt that HSS societies face a
potential funding crisis, a crisis flowing from the fact that they have become
dependent on a revenue stream that is no longer appropriate in the age of the
Internet.

The
problem is clear: Even if RCUK eventually provides the funds to enable HSS
scholars to publish most or all of their papers these are unlikely to be
sufficient to match the revenue that societies currently earn from subscriptions.
As such, they will presumably struggle to fund all their activities, and some may
even have to contemplate ceasing operations.

Crymble’s conclusion was that the problem is
not that publishing is expensive, or that that open access is bad. “It’s that
publishing in its current model pays for other good things which will not be
supported under the new model.”

Importantly,
Crymble added, “that does not mean these wonderful extra activities need to
cease, or that open access will not work. It means we need to get behind
scholarly societies to find a new way to fund these activities.”

In other
words, if HSS societies cannot match their current subscription revenues with
money earned from APCs they will have to “get creative” (as Crymble puts it),
and seek revenue from other sources.

That this
might be feasible is implied by the fact that the majority of OA journals today
do not charge APCs. In fact, earlier this year the Director of the Office for
Scholarly Communication at Harvard Peter Suberestimated that nearly 70% of
journals listed in the Directory of Open Access
Journals
neither charge authors to publish their papers, nor readers to read them (a
model that some call Platinum OA).

We do not know
exactly how these journals are funded, but presumably they are the
beneficiaries of a subsidy or grant, or some kind of cross funding arrangement.
What we do know is that a number of alternative funding sources for HSS
journals (and books) are currently being tested — including Knowledge Unlatched’sPilot Collection (which recently
attracted HEFCE funding) and an initiative by the
Open Library of Humanities called the Library
Partnership Subsidy Scheme (about which details were unavailable at the time of
writing).

However, what
we also do not know is if societies chose
not to charge authors when publishing their papers Gold OA they would be able
to fund their publishing programme plus
their other activities by other means. It certainly does not help that very few
societies appear to be experimenting with new business models, or seeking
alternative funding streams, today. Indeed, most seem entirely focused on
trying to hold back the tide. This suggests that this may be less an issue of funding,
more a failure (or unwillingness) on the part of learned societies (HSS
societies, but also societies in other disciplines) to adapt to changing
circumstances. What societies are currently suffering from, suggests publishing
consultant Michael Clarke, is a “strategy gap”.

At this
point we really ought to ask: would it not be better for HSS scholars and societies
to embrace OA before they are forced to do so?

After all,
however the OA wars end, and whatever becomes of the RCUK policy, they are surely
going to have to adapt to the new world. For instance, even if Harnad is right and
RCUK eventually forsakes its gold-preferred model, there must be serious doubts
that research funders will ever agree that 36 month embargoes are an acceptable
form of Green OA. (Although if a journal allows immediate deposit of the
author’s version, a few OA advocates say
that is sufficient, possibly).

And we
must doubt that funders will ever give up hope of making Gold OA the norm, particularly
given the growing calls for re-use and text mining rights, and the accompanying
expectation that papers have to be published under CC-BY licences.

Interestingly,
the SHERPA/RoMEO database indicates that
both the Journal of Hellenic Studiesand
the Journal of Roman Studies currently require only a
12-month embargo. Should we conclude from this that Classicists are beginning
to accept that shorter embargo lengths are inevitable, and societies are
beginning to adapt quietly as a result? Or were the Classical societies flying
a kite when they argued the need for a 36 month embargo in their BIS submission?

Certainly
it might be foolish for HSS scholars and their societies to continue sitting around
waiting until they are compelled to embrace OA, rather than doing so on their
own terms now.

This point
was made recently by Dutch junior education minister Sander Dekker, who warned that
unless
the Dutch research community voluntary embraces OA by 2016 the Dutch government
will implement a gold-preferred model along the lines of RCUK’s.

In short, to
sit through RCUK’s five-year transition period in the hope that the issue will
go away is to stick one’s head in the sand. Rather than complaining about the way
in which OA is being imposed on them, for instance, HSS scholars could take a leaf
out of Harvard’s book and vote for OA themselves. And in doing so they might be
better viewing it not as a duty to make publicly funded research freely
available to taxpayers, but as a reaffirmation of what universities view as their raison d'être — to create
and disseminate knowledge.

We could
note that a further distinguishing feature of the Harvard-style policy is that it
takes a rights-retention approach to OA. That is, faculty grant the university
a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for
any non-commercial purpose. This means that the university is free to make scholars’
articles OA as and when they wish, and without having to seek approval from
publishers — since publishing contracts are inevitably signed downstream of the
point at which the university acquires nonexclusive rights in papers.

One could
argue that this might address the concern HSS scholars have over the loss of
author’s rights. It would also seem to moot publisher embargoes, since the policy
gives any university with a Harvard-style policy the right to make papers OA
independently of publishers.

Moreover,
the Harvard-style policy generally requires scholars to deposit their papers even if they have asked
for a waiver.
The paper then resides in the repository as part of a “dark archive”. While
this would not make the paper OA, it could nevertheless be released from the
dark archive by means of a “copy request” button.

As such,
the Harvard-style OA policy would appear to offer researchers who resent compulsion
a way of accepting the inevitable on their own terms. It would also help focus societies’
minds on the need to adapt.

If university
OA policies became widespread in the UK one could envisage a scenario in which,
in five years’ time, UK researchers were all depositing their papers in their
repositories with little or no embargo, and publishers had found ways to
accommodate this activity. In such circumstances there would be no need for
RCUK to enforce its policy.

Is this
not the scenario Harnad predicts: RCUK’s attempt to force Gold OA on the
research community being subverted by a rapid uptake in self-archiving? Not
quite, since Harnad envisages this occurring as a result of HEFCE’s requirement
that only works that have been self-archived can be eligible for REF
consideration.

The
question that arises here, however, is who will monitor compliance, and how
encompassing could we expect HEFCE’s strategy to be? REF only requires three
outputs per scholar to be submitted (for HSS at least), not everything they
have published. In addition, not all members of a faculty will be included in
the REF evaluation process. As such, only a subset of UK research might be made
OA. Institutional mandates could, therefore, be more effective, or at least have
the effect of reinforcing HEFCE’s policy — making Harnad’s prediction more
likely to occur.

If nothing
else, by taking the initiative in this way, scholars could hope to assert more control
over their own destinies, possibly avoiding further erosion of their
independence, and limiting the excessive managerialism the RCUK policy
threatens.

As I write
this, I understand that at least one UK university is looking to introduce a
Harvard-style OA policy — a sign perhaps that UK researchers are beginning to
see the appeal of US voluntarism? The question to ask perhaps is, which is
better — compulsion or voluntarism?

Of course
life is always more complicated than we might like. As we noted, the government
favours Gold OA partly because — if introduced in the way RCUK proposes — it would
allow publishers to maintain their current profit levels. This is important to
the UK government because many scholarly publishers are based in the UK and/or are
seen to make an important contribution to the British economy.

Publishers
(and thus the UK government) really do not like Green OA because it would
likely have a negative impact on their revenues, and eventually limit the role
they play in scholarly communication — a process that Harnad characterises as a
“leveraged transition”. Essentially, growing
OA-provision through author self-archiving would, says Harnad, would force journals
“to downsize and cut costs by phasing out most or all of the inessentials”. (By
inessentials, he means practically everything they do today bar managing the peer
review process, which is all that would be left to them). Only at that point,
says Harnad, could Gold OA be provided at a reasonable price – what he call “Fair Gold”.

And that
of course is why HSS scholars and societies cannot rely on Harnad’s prediction
coming true. Moreover, the problem for society publishers is that both Green and
Gold roads to OA are likely to be financially punishing, since even RCUK’s
gold-preferred model seems unlikely to preserve their current revenues.

In short,
it is devilishly complicated. But is it
better to put your head in the sand, or try to control your fate?

Fundamentally changed

What needs
to be stressed, however, is that the key issue at the heart of the OA debate is
not which form of OA is best; it is not the rights and wrongs of the Finch
Report; it is not the merits of the new RCUK OA policy or publisher profits;
and it is not whether governments should compel researchers to embrace OA. Nor,
as Osborne rightly points out, is it a question of morality. No, the
fundamental and unavoidable fact is that the Internet is in the process of radically
disrupting traditional ways of doing things, not least scholarly publishing.

As the
2003 Berlin Declaration put it “The Internet has
fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing
scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the
Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive
representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the
guarantee of worldwide access.”

All in
all, it would seem to be only a question of time before publishers, researchers
and societies have to accept that OA is inevitable, and that this will sooner
or later have financial consequences.

Why do we say
this? Because the Internet allows information and knowledge to be shared in
ways not previously possible, and at much lower costs. How crazy would it be,
therefore, to spurn the financial benefits the Internet promises by trying to
lock industrial-age distribution and economic models into the online era? And
would it not be mad to do so simply in order to protect publishers and
societies from having to change the way they do things?

And as
noted earlier, even if the Internet had not developed, the current
subscription-based system is no longer fit for purpose, since it does not scale.
If even the wealthiest universities in the world are unable to afford access to
all the journals they need we must conclude that the system is broken. This
makes it a happy coincidence that OA has arrived to save the situation.

The danger
is that while insisting on a Gold-preferred OA model in order to protect the
revenues of publishers, governments and funders can improve access to research it
will not enable taxpayers (who, after all, pay the bill for scholarly
publishing) to realise the cost savings the Internet can provide. In any case,
how long could these changes be resisted? Governments have in the past sought
to protect outdated business practices and industries, but almost always
unsuccessfully.

There is
no doubt that OA presents HSS scholars and their societies with challenges. It
would therefore help if, instead of impatiently waving away their concerns, and
accusing them of being elitist or dim-witted, OA advocates engaged them in
discussion.

It is
worth noting that following his entry into the debate, Osborne has already
changed his views on one thing. In his essay he suggested that his objections
to OA are equally relevant to the sciences as they are to HSS disciplines. In
the Q&A above, however, he says, “I’ve become convinced that there are some
pretty fundamental differences between what publication means in the sciences
and what it means in the arts.”

A small concession,
but one demonstrating that people often adapt their views as a result of
engaging in a debate. And even if they don’t immediately agree many will if you
persevere.

Let’s
finish by revisiting Osborne’s claim that the public would not understand
scholarly papers even if they were given access to them. Ironically, his intervention
has served to remind us that, on the contrary, one of the benefits of OA is that
peer-reviewed papers can be made freely available not just to other scholars,
but to members of the public.

No doubt
many (even most) lay people will struggle to understand these papers, but some
will, and some may even go on to contribute to the world’s knowledge bank as a
result. That is why one consequence of the development of the Internet is a
growth in autodidacticism, and what Charles Leadbeater calls the “Pro-Am Revolution”.

It seems
fair to assume, therefore, that as more and more research is made freely
available online we will see more Andrakas. And while making HSS papers freely
available is highly unlikely to produce new medical techniques, society can
surely only benefit from a more informed and knowledgeable citizenry. Might not
making ancient history scholarship freely available to all increase public
understanding of democracy? Why would any democratic nation, or humanities
scholar, seek to prevent that possibility simply in order to preserve a few
companies and organisations from having to change the way they do things, or
reduce the profits they can make from dissemination knowledge.

Osborne is
wrong to say that ordinary citizens cannot understand scholarly papers, and he
is wrong to suggest that anyone wanting to engage with scholarly thought should
first pay for an education, and then pay again for access to scholarly writing.
We must therefore agree with Mike Taylor that on this Robin Osborne makes no
sense. However, we should not belabour Osborne for saying it. Rather, we should
seek to engage him in debate, in the hope that he will change his views as a
result.

~~

On a personal note: My wife is a Classicist,
and she has in the past worked with both Robin Osborne and Peter Heslin. As a
consequence, I knew of them and their work prior to undertaking this Q&A,
and I have met them both. My wife also knows Jim O’Donnell. I have, however,
not shown or discussed this text with my wife — whose views on OA are different
to all the views discussed here.

~~

Robin Osborne Response

I emailed the above text to Robin Osborne
before publication and he sent the following response:

I much enjoyed your discussion —
though I could have told you that my position was extremist! I was fed up with
the fundamental basis of OA never being discussed, and so volunteered to try to
put together the arguments against OA.

It is because I was interested in
challenging the claim that publicly-funded research should (obviously) be
freely available that I did not engage with the difference between gold and
green, where green was being represented as simply a practical compromise on
gold. If I had a regret it is that I did not entitle the article “Why compelling
Open Access makes no sense”.

The one thing that most amuses me
about the indignant responses to my piece is the assumption that my last
paragraph was saying that you needed a PhD in ancient history to understand
what I write. The point was simply about the contrast between a government that
makes people pay for their post-18 education and a government that makes
researchers provide their technical research to everyone free of charge.

If I put my research into a lecture
it is fine for the government to be asking people to pay to hear my lecture;
but as soon as I write down the words pure OA would hold that no one is allowed
to charge for them. For the removal of doubt this seems to me precisely
backwards: it is the lecture that needs to be freely available, and no one is
remotely being harmed by having to pay modestly for hard copy.

There
is one place where I think your argument is poor. You write:

RP: But
he then adds: “Those who, on the basis of those signals, expect that they will
understand and are interested enough in what I think and what I have said, pay
for access to my thoughts.”

In other
words, Osborne believes that, whatever the intended audience, the work of
scholars should always come with a price tag attached. Or as he put it his
essay, “If there are fees for access to teaching there should be fees for
access to research.”

This is the classic fallacy of converting an 'is'
into an 'ought': I was giving a description of the world as is — in the context
of an argument which is trying to point out how the current system works well.
To move from this description to what 'ought' to be the case in some other
possible world would depend on your defining the terms of that world.

RP: We could also comment that Osborne’s point
about the need to write to a particular audience assumes it is possible to
anticipate the level of understanding any reader brings to a text, and that all
the readers of any piece of writing come with the same level of understanding.

Again this misunderstands: it is not that the
author determines who reads what text, but that the form of publication gives a
clue to the reader of what sort of an academic contribution they will find, and
they can target their reading accordingly. Readers of any particular form will
indeed have different levels of understanding, but they will know what the
entry level of understanding is that that form of communication expects. In
Classics, Omnibus articles claim to be understandable by any sixth-former;
Greece and Rome articles by any teacher; JHS articles by someone studying a
degree in a relevant subject.

~~

Earlier contributors to
this series include palaeontologist Mike Taylor, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad, former librarian Fred Friend, SPARC director Heather Joseph, publishing consultant Joseph Esposito, de
facto leader of the Open Access movement Peter Suber, Open Access Advocacy leader at the Latin American
Council on Social Sciences (CLASCO) Dominique Babini, Cameron Neylon, advocacy director for the non-profit OA publisher Public Library of
Science, Philippe Terheggen, Managing Director, STM Journals at Elsevier, Michelle Willmers,Project Manager of the OpenUCT Initiative at the University of Cape
Town (UCT) in South Africa, and Ann Okerson, Senior Advisor on Electronic Strategies for the Center for Research
Libraries (CRL), and a former Associate University Librarian at Yale
University.

2 comments:

1. OA is first and foremost about peer-reviewed journal articles (not books).

2. OA is first and foremost is order to make those articles accessible to all their would-be users, not just those researchers whose institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which each appears. (Maximal researcher access to research is the main benefit to the public that funds the research. Public access is just a secondary benefit; and it is utterly fatuous to call this "elitism.")

3. No difference whatsoever between humanities and sciences on any of this. And no "academic freedom" issues whatsoever (with Green OA self-archiving).

4. The Harvard-style consensus copyright-retention policy (with opt-out option) does not work unless it is coupled not only with (i) an immediate-deposit requirement (with no opt-out option) but also with (ii) a HEFCE-Liege-style mechanism for monitoring and ensuring compliance with the deposit requirement. (Only deposited articles are eligible for performance review, research assessment, research funding applications and grant renewal.)

5. Only 3-4 articles are actually submitted to HEFCE REF, but REF covers a forward-going 6-year span, and one does not yet know in 2014 which of one's 2014-2020 articles one will choose to submit for REF2020. So to make them eligible for 2020, they need to be immediately deposited in 2014. (That's the pragmatic heart of HEFCE's immediate-deposit requirement!)

I'll be posting a point-for-point on Willetts soon, but suffice it to say that he is quite mistaken in claiming that the rest of the world is going his way: it's not, and it won't. And the reason is simple: Economics. What's in the best interests of research, worldwide, is in conflict with Willetts's parochial preference for propping up publishers' current revenue levels, come what may.

Publishers are embargoing Green to try to force institutions to pay their asking price for (Fool's) Gold (sweetening the deal by adding re-use rights to free online access). It won't work. Access is what is most urgently needed. Green OA via immediate-deposit mandates will provide that access. And then the adaptive transition to Fair-Gold OA and all the re-use rights users need and authors want to provide will happen quite naturally of its own accord. The outcome that is optimal and inevitable for research will have come to pass; the only thing it will not be possible to say about the outcome will be that it had been prompt…

After several lunchtimes, I have finally made my way to the end of this mammoth dissertation. Richard, many thanks for analysing the situation out in such detail.

Just a few comments.

The government favours Gold OA partly because -- if introduced in the way RCUK proposes -- it would allow publishers to maintain their current profit levels. This is important to the UK government because many scholarly publishers are based in the UK and/or are seen to make an important contribution to the British economy.

That plan is terribly flawed, of course, for the same reason that British Leyland collapsed. We live in global markets now. If the prices charged by British publishers stay unreasonably high (and their products remain inferior) then customers will go and buy Japanese cars instead; or in this case, publish with BMC, PLOS, Hindawi, PeerJ, Ubiquity, or one of the many other open-access publishers that gets a better job done for somewhere between a half and a thirtieth of what the legacy publishers charge.

Robin Osborne wrote: I was fed up with the fundamental basis of OA never being discussed

Finally, Osborne again: The point was simply about the contrast between a government that makes people pay for their post-18 education and a government that makes researchers provide their technical research to everyone free of charge.

This is sleight of hand. The very fundamental difference between the finances of education and research is the the marginal cost of each copy of a research paper is zero; while that of educating an additional student is very much not.